Let’s get those Z’s
As the lines between work and personal lives blur, leisure-time seems to have made a quiet, but noticeable, exit. How often does it feel like you have no control over your life and wish you could just rein it all in and be the captain of your own ship? It feels like we’ve run out of hours in the day to invest in ourselves. We’re supposed to have family and friends (who love you), a job (and be good at it), pay bills and taxes (on time) and remember where we kept the damn keys, while the world spins madly on. We’re never in control so we try – we try to understand what we read in the news, what insurance we need, and what stocks even mean, but most of the time we can’t even seem to stay hydrated.
In a desperate attempt to reclaim a (half-baked) sense of freedom, and avenge our stolen time, we force “me-time” into the only time we comfortably can. You know those times at 1:00 A.M. when you should be asleep, but you power through the fourth episode of Too Hot To Handle? Then you move onto a session of doom scrolling that leads you to something called a ‘gua sha’? So now you need to do an internet deep dive and learn all you can about it, which reminds you of Korean skin care and that Korean TV show your friend won’t stop raving about. So you embark on a journey to listen to their entire discography while simultaneously studying about the protagonist on Wikipedia. All this while you fight off a sleep bug and the looming reality of waking up for tomorrow’s responsibilities.
The awareness of the lack of power we have over our lives has unveiled a strange response from us, through something that is now popularly called “revenge bedtime procrastination”. Of course this looks different on different people, but the phenomenon remains unchanged – delaying sleep, knowing the repercussions thereof, as a response to being overstretched. Over the years, this has exacerbated especially as the boundaries between work and home have come to disappear. Research has, in fact, shown that sleep deprivation is going to be the new epidemic. But when we spend all day working and tending to responsibilities or needs outside of ourselves, we want to take back our lost time at any cost.
There’s no doubt that the irony is apparent. Retaliation by trying to regain time for yourself at the expense of sleep is just self-sabotage and presents to us a paradox, or catch-22, whatever you’d like to call it.
While there is novelty in that stolen “me-time”, no one should be in that desperate a need of a break. Although, you best believe social media and streaming services, A.K.A. the holy grail of distraction, will be there with arms wide open – in the form of 15 second reels, 20 minute episodes, clickbait gossip and more. They will see you grappling for mindless content and they will shower you with just that.
We already know what lack of sleep does to our mood and productivity, because we deal with it often enough. In the long run, though, consequences are far worse than they seem – mentally and physically. How do we overcome this glaring issue and carve out some time for ourselves then? The truth is, there is no right answer. Everyone’s lives demand different things from them. However, it is important that we are conscious and intentional about working on this. So even if it takes an alarm to remind you to give yourself a break in the middle of the day, do it and figure out the activity that provides you the detachment you need.
